"Man--you're glad she's coming?"

"If her coming means that she is on our side; yes."

It was ten o'clock of a great July day. From outside, through the low foliaged casement of Honeysuckle Cottage, sounded the drone of a bee, the whine and splash of the well-bucket, and Caroline Staley's loud-voiced chaffering with a fisherman. Within, the lovers faced each other across the debris of a Gargantuan breakfast.

Seen, white-frocked, in the sun-moted coolth of that low whitewashed room, Aliette looked utterly the girl. Happiness had wiped clean the slate of her desolate years. Her cheeks, her eyes, her whole personality glowed with the sheer joy of matehood. Sunlight and sea-light had goldened--ever so faintly--the luster of her bared arms, the bared nape under her vivid hair.

Ronnie, too, had youthened. Gone, or almost gone from his face, was the semi-monastic seriousness. Constantly, now, smiles played about his full lips; constantly, his light-blue eyes held the semblance of a twinkle. One hardly noticed the gray in his hair for the tawn of it. Lean still, to-day his leanness was that of an athlete in training. Under his browned skin, when they bathed together, the muscles rippled like a panther's. As he rose, flanneled, from the table, it seemed almost as though happiness had added the proverbial cubit to his stature.

He came over to her and kissed the palm of her outstretched hand, her wrist, the curls at her temple.

"This afternoon," he said, "our honeymoon ends."

She laughed--but there was something of sadness in the laughter. "Man, don't be immoral. Honeymoons are legal. This hasn't been legal. It's been----"

"Heaven," he suggested.

"Yes." She took his hand. "All that--and more. But all the same, we're outcasts. We've got to realize that the world, our world, won't forgive us for having been in heaven."

Sotto voce, he consigned the world to perdition. Aloud, he answered, "They'll forgive us all right. As soon as H. B. makes up his mind to do the right thing. I expect that's what's at the bottom of the mater's wire."

"Do you?" Intimacy had made this great difference in their relationship: that they could talk of Hector dispassionately enough. "Do you? I wish I were sure. He's a peculiar man. Very obstinate and rather cruel. He may make--difficulties."

"He'll make no difficulties."

Aliette changed the topic. For a week past, the vague possibility of Hector's abiding by his threat had been frightening her. Once, even, she had precisely perceived the social ostracism such a course might entail. But in the sunshine and sea-shine of Chilworth Cove, social ostracism seemed a very tiny price to pay for happiness so great as theirs.

The first fine madness, the glamor of the grand passion was still on her, still on them both. Julia's telegram, which--cycle-forwarded across eight miles of common-land from Chilton Junction--threw the tiny port into a state of seething curiosity, excited its recipients hardly at all. Selfish with the sublime selfishness of mating-time, they regarded the threatened irruption of a mundane personality into paradise as the merest episode.

Nevertheless, as she watched the innkeeper's pony-cart, Ronnie at its reins, rattle away between the pink-washed cottages, slow to a walk up the white road, and disappear among the heathery ridges at sky-line, Aliette grew conscious of a deep abiding joy that--whatever else of harm she might bring into her lover's life--at least she had not separated him from his mother.

And all morning, all afternoon, busied with Caroline Staley in preparation for their guest, that joy warded every apprehension from her mind.